Altar Ego (34 page)

‘I gnawed the inside of my cheek. A thumping headache was zigzagging through my temples; each breath, a rasping ache. Zack was about to make a declaration of similar purport, when a doctor hurtled through the door and launched into his rote exhortation.

‘This patient has sustained a chest injury,’ he lectured the nurse in an accent thick with kilts and sporrans. ‘That, combined with abdominal pain and her swinging pyrexia,’ (he indicated the Pyrenean mountain range stencilled on to my temperature chart), ‘could indicate a sub-phrenic abscess.’ He peered at me over his bifocals. I’m going to inject a radio labelled isotope which …’

The minute he said the word ‘inject’ both men wheeled around to snap at him in unison. ‘She’s pregnant!’

‘Actually, I’d like to be discharged.’ My armpits were sweating buckets. I had a body odour which could stop armoured tanks in their tracks. ‘Like, right now.’

Light struggled through the grimy windows, highlighting the many handprints on the smeary glass, making it look as if thousands had clawed to get out of here. I knew just how they felt.

The doctor gave us all the bifocal treatment, as if we were minor bacteria beneath a microscope.

‘I have examined Ms Steele thoroughly and she is not pregnant.’

If Life imitates art, mine had just become a Hieronymus Bosch exhibition.

Julian’s tenderish expression decomposed into a look of detestation. ‘Are you sure, Doctor?’

‘Quite sure.’

‘I was going to tell you. I was.’ I tried to take refuge in Julian’s eyes. He turned away. ‘Really. I lost it, a week ago …’

That was when Hieronymus Bosch came to life in the form of Darius and a squad of policemen.

Anouska’s husband, looking like an expensive and very peeved pet, led them into the room and pointed at his wife, who started twitching like a frog in a science experiment.

‘She’s the one, Officers. You should charge her with attempted murder.’

The eyes of the other patients ping-ponged around the ward. Even Doctor Dour stopped peering over the tops of his glasses.

‘I was only trying to stop you snoring. Julian … help me,’ she implored, oscillating her hand through her hair as though auditioning for a shampoo advertisement.

My Knight in Shining Armani moved swiftly to her side. ‘Of course I will, Anouska. Just as soon as we get out of here.’

The thin mattress was like a soggy slice of white bread. I struggled into a sitting position. Wincing with pain, I hurled myself at Julian, toppling both the tray and the IV. I clung to him like a punch-drunk boxer in the final seconds of an exhausting round. ‘Don’t leave me!’

I caught sight of myself in the mirror. I had the fixed facial expression and Einstein hair of someone who has just put a knife in a toaster.

‘She’s all yours,’ said Julian to Zachary, coldly extricating himself from my embrace. ‘But be warned. This woman is like radiation. It may take you twenty years to get over her, and you’ll
still
be paying the price for that exposure.’

‘Would it change anything if I told you that when I slept with Zack I was thinking of you?’

Zack’s eyes narrowed to two hard slits of fury. He stabbed his arms into the sleeves of his leather jacket. ‘What a goddamn love story this turned out to be. It’s a “Girl Eats Boy” kinda scenario, right?’

‘Zack, I’m sorry,’ I beseeched in a tourniqueted voice. ‘I didn’t mean …’

Julian was at the door, his arm around the sobbing Anouska. ‘I’ll leave you to do some soul-searching,’ he said witheringly. ‘Of course it does help to have a soul to search.’ The door slammed shut like a trap.

‘Zack, let me explain …’

Zack flipped a fifty-pence piece on to the bed. ‘Call somebody who gives a fuck.’

Once the Police had taken everyone else off for questioning, I was left weary and waterlogged in the storm’s debris. Lifting my head up from the bed I saw only Kate, sprawled high and dry in the armchair by the window.

‘Need anything?’ she asked with poised lucidity.

‘Yeah. Menopause.’

She swung her denimed legs to the floor. ‘You were
pregnant
?’

‘I … I didn’t want it.’

Kate shook her head in disbelief. ‘And here am I, so desperate to be a mother that I weep if they serve me up baby corn in a restaurant …’

‘Um … wake up and smell the pooey nappies, Kate. You hate children. Remember? You’re a … what’s the word for kid-haters? A childophobe. A kinder-thrope.’

‘I was once, I know. But, like all women, I did vaguely plan a sprog sometime in the future. And then it hit me. There isn’t much “sometime” left. I used to think it was selfish to have a baby. But you know what? All the reasons I
didn’t
want to have a baby were
selfish
– my health, my career, my reputation, my future. Me, me, me … Am I happy? Am I fulfilled? The best thing about kids is that you’re too busy to keep asking yourself those bloody questions.’ She calmed her T-shirt creases with open palms. ‘You know your trouble, Rebecca?’

‘No. But I feel sure you’re going to tell me.’

‘You are a woman who has everything … You just don’t know how to use it.’

‘Yes, yes. I feel guilty, okay? I’ve cheated. I’ve lied. Hell. I’m probably responsible for the war in Bosnia. There. Happy now?’

But Kate, too, was making to leave.

‘Come and see me soon!’ I quipped. ‘I’ll be the one sitting in the corner, drooling and braiding my hair.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said, flinging the words over her shoulder. ‘To have a nervous breakdown you actually have to have a central nervous system.’

The door springs hummed and twanged and fell silent.

39
I’m Not Waving

LAUGH AND THE
world laughs with you. Cry and your mascara runs. Lying in that hospital ward, inhaling air full of other people’s,
sick
people’s, recycled breath, I quickly came to the conclusion that Life was Mike Tyson – and I was a club bantam-weight.

I fiddled with the name tag on my wrist. In hospital they label you in case you forget who you are or (in my situation) no one claims you. On the baggage carousel of life, I was no Vuitton valise. I was the beaten-up rucksack that comes down the chute right at the end and circles, forlorn and uncollected. I stared at the phone by the bed but couldn’t think of one single person to call. In the end I dialled the speaking clock. At least the time would talk to me every ten seconds.

Come evening I had a case of the blues. Two dozen cases. Vintage blues. I had been juggling faster and
faster
with more and more balls, and it was only now I realized it was inevitable that they would all come crashing down on my noggin. Why did sex have to complicate everything? If only we could be asexual, I thought, as a nurse changed my bandages, rolling me this way and that like a piece of dough. Dandelions, elm trees and tiny single-cell algae simply divide themselves. The greenfly has
really
got it sussed. It only has sex once every six generations. And we’re supposed to be the highest on the evolutionary scale?
I don’t think so
. Why can’t we simply form a bud or split our bodies in half or lay some bloody eggs? Then I wouldn’t be in this God-awful frigging mess.

Across the hall in another ward, the violet flicker of televisions ghosted eerily on to the walls. Below the grimy windows, London scrolled out as far as the eye could see, cramped, crotchety little streets, beneath an irritable sky. The woman in the bed next to me unloaded a throat load of streptococci into the spittoon by my head. At least, I pondered, it couldn’t get worse than this.

That was when my mother walked in. She was wearing an animal-print miniskirt of uncertain zoological provenance and a T-shirt at least five sizes too small, featuring the gold-embossed face of Julio Inglesias picked out in sequins. She beamed insincere concern in my direction. It had been nearly a year since I’d seen her.

‘You’ve done something to your hair.’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘Well, you
should
.’

My mother always had the knack of making me feel like the Elephant Man.
I am a human being
, I reminded myself. I glanced for moral support towards my father, his Brylcreemed hair parted at the customary two o’clock, but he was staring into the nebulous mid-distance, taking a rain check on life as usual.

‘Nice furniture,’ my mother said, shimmying into the armchair beneath the window, allowing maximum exposure of her lace scanties to the entire ward. ‘Stimulated leather.’

‘
Sim
ulated,’ I corrected her half-heartedly.

‘Anouska rang and tol’ me ’bout the sprog.’ I looked at her warily. Surely, she wasn’t going to be sympathetic? For the first time in her life? ‘An’, frankly, I’m that relieved. I refuse to become a gran’muvver, ya ’ear me?’ she lectured in her skidding, slovenly vowels. ‘We’ve come ’ere, ya dad an’ me, to tell ya somfink.’

Please, please let it be that I’m adopted, I thought desperately.

‘Let’s face it, ya not the muvvering type, Rebecca. I fink it’d be wise to get the doc to cut them bits outta ya, while ya in ’ere.’

I honestly thought I had astonishment fatigue, but this floored me. Although I shouldn’t have. This was how she had always treated people; as dispensable and disposable. A lot like me, I thought with a
sickening
shudder. A half-hour later, she broke off from talking with the nurses about her complex gynaecological problems to say goodbye.

‘Anythin’ you’d like me to bring ya?’

‘A life?’ I suggested sadly.

As soon as they departed, I retreated to the communal bathroom, ran a bath and, broken wrist extended, sank into the grimy tub. My lips skimmed the surface of the scummy water, sending tiny waves out towards my toes, capsizing the soap. I let the babble from the outside ward wash through the flimsy walls and right over me; the forced jollity of exhausted medics, the happy squawk of Hindu and Bengali, the jabber of visiting children. ‘Ladies and jelly-men,’ said a boy’s voice. ‘My bottom’s burping,’ said a little girl. The little boy was explaining that he had a headache in his foot and didn’t think Father Christmas believed in him. The little girl queried, in a lisping falsetto, whether the dead squirrel they’d seen on the road was going to heaven, or hell? Hell, her brother felt sure and ‘of course the devil has a wife!’ he added emphatically. ‘Everyone has one of those!’

I found myself ambushed by an unexpected longing for domestic conviviality.

The hospital ward was an eighty-degree womb, connected to the heating system by an umbilical cord of pipes. As they shuddered and juddered, pulsing water around the building, it made me think of what the doctor had described as the ‘uterine material’ that
had
been pulsing within me. I’d wanted to pretend that it was just a missed period, just a tiny bunch of cells, just a blue line on a bit of blotting paper. But listening to the childish banter I began to realize that it hadn’t just been a hiccup in my quest for personal fulfilment. I couldn’t help thinking that the thin, blue line announcing the baby’s presence was one that I should not have crossed. The knowledge that Anouska had been right punched me in the guts – there had been a little commonplace miracle stirring inside me. A miracle I’d wished away. How callously I’d marked the gift ‘return to sender’.

Waves of remorse began to replace the waves of nausea I’d felt when pregnant. All the stupid jokes I’d made, about how the baby would be the only infant on the block wearing black baby clothes and so on, began to hammer on my mind’s door. Logic battled emotion. Get real, I lectured myself. If women could ‘wish’ away their pregnancies, there would have been no backyard abortions. I told myself that losing the baby had been for the best. But the trouble was, I’d spent the last four weeks secretly adjusting. The hormones had kicked in. I’d become a furtive pram-peerer. I’d made whispered clandestine confessions to other mothers, who’d confided back about how fulfilled they felt.

So, what had gone wrong? Was it the sleeping pills I’d taken before I’d known? The aerobics and weight training I’d done afterwards? The cracks I’d made at the baby’s expense – ‘Sure I wouldn’t mind
children
…’ I’d said to anyone who asked, ‘
if someone would have them for me
.’

But it wasn’t anything I’d done. It was something I
hadn’t
done that was starting to worry me deeply. I hadn’t told anyone that I wanted the baby. That I was already fantasizing about her little face. The tiny clenched fist. The mouth puckered at my breast. The hushed excitement of the ultrasound as the doctor tried to discover the sex. The euphoria, post-birth. The friendly invasion of friends and family. Dressing her up in kangaroo Babygros with a pouch and pointy ears – photos that would humiliate her on her twenty-first birthday. I’d started to think about the Mothers’ Day cards glued in macaroni and string.

I’d pretended that losing the baby was on a par with – I dunno – having it rain before a pool party, nixing my bikini wax. Oh yes, I, Becky Steele, had been blessed at birth with a double genetic whammy. Not only was I as shallow and selfish as my ghastly mother, but I was as emotionally stunted as my poor father. I was a callow youth, at
thirty-three
. Living proof that you may only be young once … but you can be immature forever.

A throbbing inner emptiness began to eclipse the pain from my accident abrasions. Emotions began to tear at my throat. What had I done with my life? I could probably have damaged and disfigured myself more, but only if I’d used a chainsaw and a bath of acid. I’d always thought of myself as tough, caustic,
durable
, full of common sense. But that was before I’d lost everything. Not lost, but thrown away. Common sense? Well, it’s not so common. Self-disgust has a taste. Acrid and hot. A thick, black self-loathing gurgled up in the back of my throat.

I had to get out of my life! But in all the aching void of the world, where did I belong? I got an overwhelming urge to run – just as I had from the wedding, from Julian, from a career, from motherhood – from me. Because that was the truth of it. Like my mother, I was completely wrapped up in myself … And it was such a teeny, weeny package.